You must have come across the mentions of Flappy bird while travelling around internet whether you were on any website or a social networking site. A just another indie-game project by a lone developer Nguyen in Vietnam initially, Flappy Bird very soon became a global sensation leading to an implausible amount of buzz ,mystery, controversy, confusion and outrage.
However, whatever it was and whatever impact it had, there are a lot lessons for entrepreneurs to be learnt from this game. Let’s go through them one by one.
Simplicity is the best strategy
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There could have been 100 other variables in the game making it more interesting but Nguyen kept it to a simple ‘tap’ gesture so that people don’t get confused. Same happens with us too, the more complex we make our strategy; the more we get bogged down in detail and get intimidated by its intricacy. So, simple logic here is keep it simple and don’t make your strategies so complicated that it becomes like a viscous circle for you one day and that your chances of getting out of it to a resolution become almost impossible.
Identify with what people want
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Although this game was extremely hard to play and people kind of started hating it and hating anything related with it still they couldn’t stop themselves from playing it, for it made them to think that they might pass the hurdle next time and increase their scores. This is a common tendency among people that if something is really engaging they would try not giving up with it and try the next shot until they are completely exhausted or they win.
However, your product or services cannot be that frustrating for users if you have offered it to the right segment of audience, at least you have this plus point. So identify with what your audiences want from you and depending on their needs and persona offer your offers. Try striking the right nerve and here you go.
Ensure compulsion
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Nguyen tried ensuring compulsion in the game by making people feel that they can always do better in the next chance. Besides, the extremely simple game design made the people to wonder why can’t they get a score higher than 2.
This is what entrepreneurs need to do; they need to create a compulsion for their consumers by a number of means such as by offering promotional discounts, mentioning limited period offer and so on. Besides, in order to get your consumers addicted to your product or your content you need to do both give good after-sales service and produce good & informative content constantly.
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Social proof ads value
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Social proof adds value to your business by sparking word of mouth and viral marketing. As we have discussed above that people hated this game for it was too difficult and they shared their frustration on the social network they were on, making it go viral. Although, it was done negatively but if positive, social proof can do wonders. Hence, try to have social proof of your success on your website or wherever you represent your business. You can also give your consumer incentives like discounts, products and ask them to share your product pictures with their friends on social outlets.
Don’t imitate others but learn from their mistakes
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We all know that flappy bird was inspired from the most popular ‘the Mario brothers’ game that ruled gamer’s hearts for more than three generations however the complexity of this game was the main reason why people didn’t like it much as compared to the Mario brothers game.
The same way don’t try to imitate your competitors rather try finding the loop holes in their strategy or where they lack and apply that to your strategy and make implementations. Besides, there is a wonderful tool offered by Google i. e. Google keyword planner tool that give you all relevant information about any keyword such as its competiveness, its search volume and so on. So you can gather all information regarding your keywords from there. After that you can go to search engines and type in those keywords and see which of your competitors come at the top. Now instead of just imitating them try finding their loop holes and work on them proactively.
So before you completely forget Flappy Bird, hopefully the tips based on the technicalities of this game must help you with that game-changing idea and help you taking your business to the next level. However, if you have got any other lesson from this game that will be helpful for entrepreneurs, please do let us know in comments.
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